Vasily Grossman was a Russian/Jewish writer most known for his novel Life and Fate. It was banned by the Communists, smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the West in 1980.
But before that, Grossman was a correspondent for the Red Army during World War II, writing first-hand accounts of some of the greatest battles of the Eastern Front, including the battle of Stalingrad. Attached to the unit that liberated Treblinka, Grossman was one of the first journalists to write about the Holocaust.
The Road (NYRB Classics) is a new collection of Grossman’s short fiction and essays, most of which have never been published in English before. The pieces run from his early 1930s stories to his last story, In Kislovodsk, a moving story about a Soviet doctor asked by the occupying Nazis to facilitate the murder of Soviet PoWs. It was published just after he died in 1964.
Included in this collection are two important works: the short story The Old Teacher, which is among the first works of fiction about the Holocaust, and the powerful essay The Hell of Treblinka, one of the first published accounts of a Nazi death camp.
The Old Teacher, published in 1943, is a short story about the massacre of a small Ukrainian town’s Jews.
While at times Grossman’s prose can veer toward exaggeration and Soviet propaganda, his strength lies in his characters and descriptive detail.
The Old Teacher begins with an idyllic setting in a countryside peasant village as Boris Isaakovitch, the 82-year-old title character, sits outside in the sun with a book by Chekhov on his lap. “He was breathing in the smell of onions and sunflower-seed oil and enjoying the warmth of the sun-warmed stone.”
But beneath this idyllic setting lies a sinister foreboding. It is June 1942, and the advancing German army is steps away from their town. Stories of the disappearance of Jews in the other occupied towns prey heavily on the minds of the town’s Jewish population.
“They’re going to need people like us – surely you can see that they’re going to need doctors and teachers,” the town doctor, Weintraub, optimistically tells Boris when he asks to be given a suicide dosage.
Grossman describes the oncoming Nazi menace with a horror-novel-like atmosphere. “The Nazis drew everything dark up to the surface, just as a black spell in an old tale calls up the spirits of evil. That night the little town lay stifling, gripped by something foul and dark. Something vile had awoken; stirred by the Nazis’ arrival, it was now reaching towards them.”
The fate of the town’s Jews is inevitable. Yet Grossman is able to inject a spark of human decency into this horror with the scene of a young girl shielding the teacher’s eyes from the carnage of the mass grave site.
Little human decency exists in The Hell of Treblinka, published in November 1944, just a few months after the camp’s liberation. This essay is a vivid and imaginative description of the Nazi death camp.
He begins with a detached, matter-of-fact geographic description. “Here on the branch line to Siedlce, stands the remote station of Treblinka,” and then slowly pulls you into the stark horror of the camp.
“Nothing in this camp was adapted for life,” he writes. “Everything was adapted for death.”
He describes the assembly line “conveyer belt executioner’s block” setup of the camp, comparing it to a slaughter house; from the train station where an orchestra played to greet the new arrivals to the square where they left their suitcases and were processed, to “the road of no return,” the path where they walked to the gas chambers disguised as showers.
He imagines what it would have been like in the square, where men were separated from their wives, mothers and children: “Love– maternal, conjugal or filial love – told people that they were seeing one another for the last time. Handshakes, kisses, blessings, tears, brief hurried words into which people put all their love, all their pain, all their tenderness, all their despair.”
At times though, when he tries to describe the thoughts of those in the gas chamber, his imagination fails him:
“What are the pictures now passing before people’s glassy, dying eyes? Pictures of childhood? Of the happy days of peace? Of the last terrible journey?… No, what happed in that chamber cannot be imagined.”
The Hell of Treblinka is an extraordinary essay, and it’s well worth buying the book. With little in the way of sources, Grossman relied on his observations and interviews with inmates. It was used at the Nuremberg trials as evidence. This is the first time the essay has been published in English in full.
Grossman died in September 1964, on the eve of the 23rd anniversary of the massacre of the Jews of Berdichev in which his mother died. At the time he was working on the novel Everything Flows, a scathing criticism of totalitarianism that wasn’t published in Russia until 1989.
The Road, which also contains essays and journalism, is translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Olfa Mukovnikova. It is a fitting testament to a writer whom Martin Amis calls the “Tolstoy of the USSR.”